He has a place to paint now, a yawning space within an even more cavernous building he calls the Studios at Overland Crossing, yet 73-year-old Jon Zahourek wonders if he'll ever put brush to canvas again.

A key player in the Denver arts community decades ago, Zahourek moved away and shifted his focus to devising a system of using clay to sculpt human anatomy on model skeletons and, in the process, teach the subject in a hands-on way.

That became his passion — and his business, as he has worked to sell the idea in education circles. And it's the focal point of his $2.5 million renovation of the landmark former Denver Pottery Co. building on South Delaware Street, just south of West Evans Avenue.

Artist and anatomist Jon Zahourek with one of his many models. Zahourek, a fixture on Denver's 1960s and '70s art scene, recently renovated a 16,000-square-foot studio in south Denver.

"I had a nice art career," Zahourek says, and then looks around him at displays of the bony figures that make up the canvas for his later work. "This was more important, I felt."

He left Denver in 1977 and moved east to Jersey City, N.J. There he owned a circa 1860 firehouse where he lived, worked and started Anatomy in Clay.

That soon consumed all his energy.

"For probably five or six years, I suffered without painting because I felt dream-deprived, I really missed color," Zahourek says. "But I needed to spend all my juice on what I'm doing. Painting and drawing is so seductive that if I started doing it again I might just quit doing this, or might put it off."

That came as welcome news to Virginia DuBrucq, the Denver architect who helped him design the studios — and who revered his early work.

"I can't express how absolutely exquisite his paintings are, and his drawing skills are out of this world," said DuBrucq, who met Zahourek at a drawing class in 1960s Denver. "I just want to see him paint and draw so badly. He did the studio because he wanted to paint again — but he's not doing that yet."

She recalls Zahourek displaying his work in a late-'60s exhibit with four other prominent artists of the day — Ned Jacob, Buffalo Kaplinski, George Carlson and Fritz White. The two sculptors and three painters, she recalls, "knocked everybody's socks off" with their take on contemporary Western art.

DuBrucq owns four of Zahourek's pieces, which are displayed prominently in her Denver home.

"They're really very expressive of line," she says. "Each line means so much, so there doesn't have to be a lot of lines. Some of his paintings are impressionistic, but they're... Jon's style. Not abstract. Realistic to a degree, but so sparse and so powerful."

DuBrucq specialized in residential architecture before she eased into retirement. She had helped Zahourek redesign the Jersey City firehouse and, later, a Cherry Creek condo for Zahourek and his wife and business partner, Renée Whitman.

She teamed with him again on the Overland Crossing project in the old pottery building that dates to the late 19th century, when its proximity to a rail line made it a prime location. Over the past 2½ years, Zahourek watched as DuBrucq and others transformed a "horrendous wreck" into the 16,000-square-foot studio.

Easy access to Denver's light-rail system marks one of many ways he made the building green. Much of the space, with high-tech touches like video screens and specialized lighting, is devoted to teaching areas for his anatomy project. But it also includes an open area that Zahourek offers to nonprofit organizations, at very low cost, for charity events.

And then there's the space, on the north end of the property that serves as his own studio — should he ever return to painting.

Some of his older pieces hang on the walls of a second-floor office area. Sizing them up, he explains his artistic process: He painted fast, drew fast, to "catch the impulse of life."

He cared little about light, very much about shape, always attempting to fit his figures into powerful abstract patterns.

"I never knew what was going to happen when I was painting, and I loved not knowing," says Zahourek. "Paintings and drawings and sculpture were all a surprise. The kinesthetic mind was doing the art work, not the conscious mind."

DuBrucq just wishes he would make up his mind to resume painting, especially now that he has this wide-open, well-lit studio.

"But it's sort of on the bottom of his list," she laments. "I don't know what would give him the nudge. I thought it might be giving him the space."

But it remains uncertain that even a new work space could nudge the artist past the tipping point.

"I'm afraid I might fall back head over heels into painting and not do everything I need to do," he says. "I've avoided it on that basis. But I'd still love to do it."

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